Trigun / YMMV - TV Tropes

Accidental Innuendo: At one point in the manga Vash says "You've got me pegged, Wolfwood". Cue snickering from the fandom.
Adaptation Displacement: Of a sort. The anime is very well-known in the west due to its presence on [adult swim], and most viewers are probably at least aware that it was based on a manga. However, it's somewhat less common knowledge that the manga kept going long after what the anime covered (3 volumes out of 17 total), and casual fans may have no idea there's so much more to the story. The situation is similar to that of AKIRA, where the well-known anime film only covers a small portion of the much longer manga.
Alternate Self Shipping: Some people ship the original Vash with the version from Stampede. Shipping anime and manga Vash, or any combination of the three is also not unheard of.
Anti-Climax Boss: Legato in the 1998 anime. He could have easily killed Vash at any time he wanted but didn't because he wanted him to suffer, and then commits suicide by forcing Vash to shoot him. He puts up much more of a fight in the manga.
Awesome Music: Tons of it, as well there should be — two entire soundtrack albums' worth, in fact. Tsuneo Imahori, who composed all of it, is also one of the lead guitarists in the Seatbelts.
Broken Base:
- The movie. Many fans were overjoyed that there was finally a new Trigun animation in over a decade, and liked the movie for its own merits. However, a lot of people were disappointed it didn't adapt anything from the manga and was essentially a feature length filler episode. There were also complaints about Vash's character getting Flanderized and Wolfwood being too pale. The new dub voice actors for everyone but Vash (everyone but Meryl in the Spanish dub) split things even further.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: There's a moment in Trigun Maximum where Vash and Livio are counting the coins they got from the Gung-ho guns. They were missing one. Suddenly, a muscular black guy with weird hair and skimpy disco attire comes in and gives them the coin, pulls a bug out of his mouth, then proceeds to ask whether Vash or Livio prefer clams or fish. Granted, there's a reason why this happened (Zazie used her mind control worms), but it's random, it's weird, and after the incident, nobody talks about it again.
Common Crossover: Devil May Cry inspires a ton of crossover fanwork.
Complete Monster (anime): Millions Knives, in sharp contrast to his original counterpart, is nothing but a xenophobic hatemonger fixated on wiping out humanity. Taking the slight against him by one drunken man as reason to begin his genocidal campaign, Knives killed his own human friends, before sabotaging the navigational systems of their spaceship fleet, seeking to crash the entire armada and kill untold thousands. When this fails and Knives is left stranded with his brother, Vash, on the planet Gunsmoke, Knives mocks his brother's compassion for mankind and reveals his intent to kill all the humans on Gunsmoke and replace them with his own "perfect" species. Forcing Vash to destroy a whole city, Knives has his brother ruthlessly pursued, uncaring for the lives lost in the crossfire, and proudly has one of his subordinates abandon his staunch refusal to take life.
Creepy Awesome: Legato, who is a fan favourite because of his disturbing mien, creepy voice, and love of tormenting Vash.
Crosses the Line Twice: Although it doesn't go quite as far as Having a dish shaped like Wolfwood's grave like the Trigun Stampede collaboration cafe, the 2024 collaboration cafe for Trimax still has dishes related to Wolfwood's death. You can have soda served in a bottle resembling the one Vash and Wolfwood drank right before Wolfwood dies and the spaghetti is the very same kind Vash and Livio ate after. The drink even comes with cards depicting the infamous scene of Vash and Wolfwood on the couch, and the empty couch. And once again, Knives's drink contains apples, referencing the ending where Knives using the last of his powers to create an apple tree.
Cry for the Devil:
- In the manga, some of the "Knives chapters" seem to express almost too much sympathy towards him, it even feels like Nightow identifies the most with his point of view at times.
- Legato, too. By the time his (incredibly screwed-up) background gets covered he is deep into his nervous breakdown and quadriplegic, and though he never stops being a horrifying monster, he's become such a desperately pathetic one hating him just loses all its charm.
- The anime uses a more subtle variation on this trope on Legato too: he spends most of the last couple of scenes he's in looking like he's about to cry, and revealing in monologues and interactions with Vash the extent of his massive, suicidal self-loathing. In the end, when he's demanding that Vash kill him, it becomes pretty clear that he genuinely wishes to die, for reasons that go beyond a simple desire to torment Vash. One's left with the impression that dying by Vash's hands was objectively the best thing that ever happened to him.
Draco in Leather Pants: Almost too many to count. Legato makes fangirls pass out all over the place (even though he's gay, and was even a gigolo — only in the manga, though, not that that stopped anyone). Which is especially creepy given it's implied that Legato is a cannibal. Knives has a fervent fandom too.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Brilliant Neon Dynamite.
- Also, Livio in the manga, goes from a wild card to The Lancer after Nicholas' death, and is highly loved by the fandom in spite of only appearing in the manga.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Saying that Livio or the manga version of Wolfwood are minors, especially if used to justify shipping drama, is a surefire way to anger hardcore fans of the manga and shippers of pairings involving those two characters. Though they are Younger Than They Look (especially Livio) due to the serums, the fact that the baby Wolfwood helped raise in Free Bird is eighteen (the original magazine version of the chapter even explicitly states eighteen years had passed) and that their childhood friend Jasmine appears to be the same age as Milly and Meryl pretty firmly establishes that they are in their twenties by the time of Maximum. An official supplementary source even lists Wolfwood's age as being in his 20s.
Fan Nickname: Leggie or Leggah for Legato; Bashu (i.e. the Japanese pronunciation) for Vash; Wolfie, Wolf, Nico, Woof, Woowoo, or Nick for Nicholas D. Wolfwood; sometimes Naibuzu (the Japanese pronunciation) or "Several Forks" for Knives. There's also some people that call E.G. Mine "Egg".
Fanon: All of the characters in the series have pronounced canines due to Nightow's art style, but fandom has rolled with the idea that fangs are a trait that only plants like Vash and Knives have.
Friendly Fandoms:
- Naturally, with Nightow's other works, Blood Blockade Battlefront and Gungrave.
- The fandom also has much overlap with the other space westerns from 1998, Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star.
- Due to the creators admitting mutual inspiration and even having cameos, the Wild ARMs fandom is quite entwined with the Trigun fandom.
- There was also a lot of overlap with Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Hellsing back in the day too. The creators of both series are admitted fans of Trigun to boot and Hiromu Arakawa even drew Vash for Multiple Bullets.
- Bizarrely, after a tweet from a Trigun fan recommending the book went viral and caused a Colbert Bump, This Is How You Lose the Time War became popular with Trigun fans, and people even make edits of Trigun characters reading the book.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
- Trigun is ridiculously popular in America, but not quite as much in its homeland of Japan; while the manga won a Seiun award and the anime was nominated for one more, neither of them performed well financially. Because of this, the movie premiered at Sakuracon 2010, months before the Japanese premiere.
- Character-wise, Kuroneko-sama seems disproportionally more popular in America than in Japan. What very few Japanese merch you can get of Kuroneko are usually just accessories bundled with merch of the other characters. In America on the other hand you can get Kuroneko plushies, slippers, pillows, shirts, hats, backpacks, keychains, fuzzy dice... There's possibly more American-made Kuroneko goods than there are of Vash!
Growing the Beard:
- The anime starts out as goofy, almost slice of life style misadventures as Vash roams the desert getting into trouble while Meryl and Milly desperately chase after. Then it turns into a darker, grittier story as Vash's Evil Twin rears his sinister head and Vash in caught up in a dark and horrible story of Sibling Rivalry that examines just how much a person can really expect to uphold the ideal of Thou Shalt Not Kill.
- For Vash specifically, this might be better termed Showing the Beard, as he's actually quite competent from the very start, he's just a CloudCuckoolander/prime example of Obfuscating Stupidity most of the time so it's not terribly obvious. Opinions vary as to exactly where this happens in the anime, but it's pretty early; brief flashes of Vash's badassery appear as early as the end of Episode 2, and very few would put it later than Episode 5.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- In the beginning of the series, the frequent remarks along the lines of “is (Vash) even human?” seem like a simple way to show off how badass people think Vash is. Then you learn that Vash isn’t human. Knowing how much Vash wants to fit in and be ordinary, every line about how he isn’t like the other humans is probably a twist of the knife in Vash’s heart.
- When someone says that the cross Wolfwood carries on his back is heavy he replies "That's because it's full of mercy!" Later on, that line becomes a bit sinister.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Remember that infamous scene where Vash sings the "Total Slaughter" song, and is mocked for being a terrible singer? Well, the anime came out in 1998; years later, in 2015, Johnny Yong Bosch (Vash's voice actor) would go on to voice a certain masked trickster-hero who also employs the Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass trope, and Johnny sang that show's intro theme song!
- Johhny Yong Bosch's role as Vash practically foreshadows him voicing Nero in the Devil May Cry games, which also star a gunslinger in a red coat who has an evil brother. For extra points, Bosch's character in DMC later acquires an Arm Cannon just like Vash.
Ho Yay: Vash and Wolfwood have a lot of romantic-ish interactions with each other. Legato is obviously in love with Knives and tells Vash he's "beautiful" in the unedited version of the manga.
I Am Not Shazam: His name is Vash the Stampede, not "Trigun".
Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: "Insurance Girlfriends" for Milly x Meryl and "Volkswagen" for Vash x Wolfwood.
Informed Wrongness: Julius and Moore (the two runaways from the Escape From Pain episode of the anime) are scolded by Wolfwood for running away from the caravan. However, said caravan was involved in sex slave trading with the guards routinely raping the women they were transporting and Moore was one of the women intended to be sold. One would think that Wolfwood as a priest would be more sympathetic rather than saying it's better for an entire town to profit off of the suffering of others.
Iron Woobie: Vash. Seriously, nothing is allowed to go right in his life, and he loses everything and takes it very much on his own head whenever anyone gets hurt on a half-civilized planet with almost no natural resources and loads of guns. And it took him over a hundred years to briefly give up.
It Was His Sled: Most of the anime's big twists have long since passed into common knowledge in the English-speaking anime community by now, to the extent that when [adult swim] chose one episode to air for their 2012 April Fool's Day Toonami block, it was the one where Wolfwood dies. One promotional cafe event for Trigun Stampede even included numerous jokes about Wolfwood's fate in both the manga and 1998 anime in its menu and promotional art.
LGBT Fanbase: The attractive but never objectified male and female characters attract a steady gay, bi, and lesbian fanbase. Elendira is beloved by trans fans.
Like You Would Really Do It: Come on. Was there anybody who honestly thought Vash had died in Badlands Rumble?
Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Surprisingly, Livio just might be the most shipped character among manga fans, even more than Vash or Wolfwood. He is frequently paired with either Vash, Jasmine, or Wolfwood, occasionally Milly and Meryl, and even with Brad, Elendira and Midvalley.
Magnificent Bastard: The desert world of Gunsmoke is a relentless one, filled with bandits, natural dangers and political corruption. These individuals demonstrate the wit, ruthlessness and guile needed to navigate its chaos.
- Manga: Millions Knives is a humanoid plant who was driven to misanthropy upon discovering humanity had performed horrifying experiments on his own kind. As a child having manipulated the "Great Fall," an event where he caused an entire fleet of humanity to crash to their deaths on the planet Gunsmoke, Knives now seeks revenge on both humans and his twin Vash for allying with them. Siccing the Gung-Ho Guns onto Vash to distract and torment him by targeting innocents, Knives traverses Gunsmoke and influences other Plants to merge with him, making him all the stronger as he reveals his final plan to lure the final vestiges of humanity to Gunsmoke, wipe them all out, and use their Plant captives to create a new, peaceful world of nature and flourishing life. Upon being defeated and witnessing humanity realize the error of their ways, Knives saves his brother's life and spends his last moments granting a poor family a bountiful apple tree as the only recompense for his atrocities he is able to perform.
- Anime:
  - Legato Bluesummers sheds his manga counterpart's Laughing Mad insanity and numerous breakdowns, instead being a suave, always calm mastermind who serves as Vash's true Arch-Enemy in the series. A nihilist with the belief that all of humanity meaningless and deserves to be purged to save it from misery and despair, Legato allies with Millions Knives in preparing for the destruction of humankind and the rising of Plant life. Not entirely devoid of respectable attributes even as he sends the Gung-Ho Guns after Vash with orders to target civilians in the process just to torture the pacifistic hero, Legato slaughters a group of human traffickers and frees their slaves, informing the young women to use their time wisely before Knives wipes them all out. In the end, Legato forces Vash to break his Thou Shalt Not Kill code, giving him the ultimatum of either shooting Legato or watching as his best friends are murdered by the villain, and dies with a smile on his face as he knows the act of taking a human life will drive Vash into utter despair.
  - (Episode 4: "Love And Peace"): Ingway is a Clint Eastwood inspired bandit who infiltrates a bar that Milly and Meryl were in before holding Stefany, the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, Earl Bostalk, hostage. Demanding $$100,000 and a wagon, Ingway is suspicious when the Sheriff complies, sending one of his men to investigate. When it’s revealed to be a ruse, Ingway defeats the mercenaries the Sheriff hired with Vash’s assistance before revealing his true intention: to lure Bostalk to attain vengeance for him murdering the town’s original inhabitants, of which a teenage Ingway was the only survivor, and taking the land as his own. Cornering Bostalk, Ingway has a change of heart, merely shooting his shoulder before voluntarily turning himself in, content to have exposed Bostalk's crimes.
  - (Episodes 7-8): Kaite is the neglected son of the inventor of the Sand Steamer, Richard Trevisick. Left homeless after his father’s death, he agreed to work with the infamous "Bad Lads" Gang to rob the steamer for money, sneaking onboard and appealing to Vash's kind-heartedness with a fabricated sob story before knocking him out and signaling the Bad Lad’s leader B.D Nemo to rob the passengers. After discovering Nemo intends to crash the Steamer off a cliff, Kaite is horrified and escapes with a recently-conscious Vash. Initially considering leaving the passengers to their fate, Kaite relents and acts as Mission Control to Vash, using a detailed blueprint he made through observing his father’s work. After Vash makes a wrong turn, Kaite is knocked unconscious, but awakens after Vash beats Nemo in a duel, providing instruction to the train attendants before performing a Heroic Sacrifice to switch off an obscured pressure valve in the boiler room. Kaite manages to survive his burns and thanks Vash for helping him follow the righteous path his father wanted him to take.
  - Badlands Rumble (2010 film): Gasback Gallon Getaway is a roguish, boisterous criminal who, despite his brutish appearance, is in truth a calculating thief who views the act of robbery and thievery as "art" forms. After his initial bank heist is foiled by treacherous minions, Gasback spends decades plotting both revenge against the men for "sullying" the art of robbery with their dishonorable betrayal, and the greatest heist he's ever concocted. Laying waste to two of the men's prospering enterprises, Gasback repeats the process on his final betrayer, revealing at the same time that each of his before robberies were all to amass materials needed to steal a Plant, which he pulls off flawlessly before escaping. Giving Vash one of the hardest fought battles of his life through sheer determination to never lose, Gasback gains respect for the hero when beaten, and is revealed to have spent those decades of planning taking care of a woman he loved and even leaving her enough money to sustain her for the rest of her life. Always charming even with his loud personality, Gasback was undoubtedly the most swashbuckling villain Vash ever faced.
Memetic Loser: E.G. Mine.
Memetic Mutation:
- Is this some sort of Christian magic?
- Drawing Knives as Gordon Ramsay is also very popular within certain sectors of the fandom.
- The outer road. ^Explanation
- The Couch ^Explanation
- Bigolas Dickolas Moment ^Explanation
Misaimed Fandom: There's a phenomenon of edgy Jerkass Internet Jerk types having "badass" looking pictures of Vash as their social media icons, particularly this image◊. Anyone who's actually read or watched Trigun would see the irony.
- On the other hand you have people who decided to become pacifists after seeing or reading the series, as some argue that Vash's entire arc, at least in the anime, is about letting go of his ideals because they're unhealthy and unsustainable, and only causing more suffering to himself and others.
Moe: Let's face it, Vash is a very Moe character. You just have to see the visceral Squees he seems to trigger all over the fandom. Livio also gets similar reactions from those who read the manga, in a more gap moe sort of way.
Narm:
- Vash and Knives's pathetic ways of arguing about their very extreme ideologies bring out their emotional immaturity, as they can't seem to get more nuanced than "everybody is good vs. everybody is evil."
- The "There's so much pain in my leg" scene from the anime. To the point where the most viewed Youtube clip of the scene is titled "Funny Knives and Vash".
- Also, the July incident, when Knives unlocks Vash's Arm Cannon and attempts to have him annihilate the area. Vash reacts in typical horror, and as he points the cannon towards Knives, the latter shouts "ARE YOU ACTUALLY GOING TO SHOOT ME AGAIN?" The scene comes across as more hilarious, not just because of the hamminess of it all, but also because Vash, owing to his spiky blond hair, looks a little like Bill Rizer of the Contra video game series in the closeups. In the following scene, Knives, in a regenerating tank, tells Legato "Make Vash suffer. Make him suffer for all eternity.", while largely naked with the lower body just barely covered.
- The manga reveals that Gray the Ninelives is nine dwarf people in a giant person suit. It invites comparisons to Vincent Adultman way too easily. The anime changes it to the rather more sensible reveal that he's a robot.
One-Scene Wonder: The impostor Vash from the first volume of Maximum actually has somewhat of a fan following.
Periphery Demographic: Has a very large female following for a seinen, something even the author has noted. There's also a surprisingly amount of Christian fans who see Christian themes in the story, even though the author has denied any sort of religious message.
Portmanteau Couple Name: Mash for Meryl x Vash, VashWood for Vash x Wolfwood, MilWood for Milly x Wolfwood, and LivWood for Livio x Wolfwood.
Ships That Pass in the Night: Meryl x Knives is a surprisingly popular ship with a lot of fanart and fanfic even though the two characters haven't interacted much if at all in canon. Brilliant Dynamite Neon with Gasback became a crack ship with a cult following, dubbed "Crime Time". Some people also ship Vash with the fake Vash from the first volume of Maximum. Brad and Livio were popular enough to get doujinshi in spite of only interacting a small amount in canon. There's also people that ship Livio with Meryl in spite of them not interacting much just because of the height difference. Livio also gets shipped with Milly due to them both being Bruisers With A Soft Center.
Showy Invincible Hero: Vash. Despite the Gung-Ho Guns being the deadliest and most ruthless killers on the planet, all of them are no match for Vash. The only opponent who is his equal is his brother, Knives.
Squick: In the manga, when Zazie the Beast pulls a worm out of her crotch.
Suspiciously Similar Song: The anime's Instrumental Theme Tune sounds very similar to Led Zeppelin's song "Black Dog".
This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Western In Space on crack! Characters on alcohol, steroids and gunpowder-huffing!
Trans Audience Interpretation: Due to the fact that all other plants in the series are female, some fans have interpreted Vash and Knives as trans men.
Ukefication: Some fanworks portray Vash as a total pushover (usually to pair him with Wolfwood) and his softer redesign and more passive role in Trigun Stampede only made it worse. Yes, he's a pacifist, yes, he's kind, but when the situation is dire he is NOT soft.
Unexpected Character: No one was expecting Descartes of all characters to get a Funko Pop. Especially odd since fan-favorite and far more plot-relevant Legato didn't get one.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Wolfwood in the Escape From Pain episode for willing to turn a blind eye to the caravan's involvement in slavery.
Viewer Gender Confusion: At first glance, Ludia basically looks like a black haired Vash, when in reality it's an old lady that must be pushing her 40's. And for the record, Kuroneko-sama is a girl kitty.
Wangst: Vash in the anime after killing Legato.
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: While Trigun Maximum is seinen, the original Trigun manga preceding it, which is much gorier than the 1998 anime, is in fact for the Shonen Demographic and even has furigana for kids that can't read kanji yet.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?:
- While not strictly kids stuff, the anime is tame enough that many people think that the Maximum is more of the same and would be appropriate for middle schoolers. They would be very, very wrong. There's graphic on-page Gorn rather than the gory discretion shots used in the anime, Body Horror that would be right at home in AKIRA, and a rather graphic on screen rape scene. Unfortunately did Dark Horse not get the memo and rates Maximum as 14+...

YMMV / Trigun

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